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sublinearlast Friday at 10:20 PM2 repliesview on HN

The part that's most infuriating is that we don't have to speculate at all. Any discussion or philosophizing beyond the literal computer science is simply misinformation.

There's absolutely no similarity between what computer hardware does and what a brain does. People will twist and stretch things and tickle the imagination of the naive layperson and that's just wrong. We seriously have to cut this out already.

Anthropomorphizing is dangerous even for other topics, and long understood to be before computers came around. Why do we allow this?

The way we talk about computer science today sounds about as ridiculous as invoking magic or deities to explain what we now consider high school physics or chemistry. I am aware that the future usually sees the past as primitive, but why can't we try to seem less dumb at least this time around?


Replies

Kim_Bruninglast Friday at 11:23 PM

> There's absolutely no similarity between what computer hardware does and what a brain does.

But at very least there's also no similarity between what computer hardware does and what even the simplest of LLMs do. They don't run on eg. x86_64 , else qemu would be sufficient for inferencing.

pitajlast Friday at 11:14 PM

Similarity of the hardware is absolutely irrelevant when we're talking about emergent behavior like "thought".